Marking

Marking kills teachers. I don’t know anyone that looks at a massive pile of books and thinks way-hey! However, right from the start of my career, when I was a very naive English NQT, I had to find a way of coping. Back then I had no say in what the marking policy looked like; to be honest, I don’t think there was a policy, just a vague hope that teachers would turn up and no one would get thrown out of the window. These days I do have a say, I have the ultimate say, and as I still teach myself it has to be something I can practice alongside all my other responsibilities. Our marking policy is now a feedback policy, and it has to keep all sorts of people happy: students, parents,

There are a number of areas of my teaching practice that I’m looking to seriously improve this year and I’ve been writing about each aspect over the last few weeks. Perhaps of the utmost importance is feedback and marking. I am now entering my fifth year of teaching… crikey! I have been finding time after time that my marking has been taking me AGES. As an English teacher, it can soon stack up anyway but it was becoming an unmanageable beast. I was commenting and annotating and highlighting and target setting. Students would read it, sometimes ask me to discuss it and then it would be put to one side. I’d mark their next piece of work and the cycle would happen again. Nothing was done with the feedback and necessary changes weren’t being implemented. Even if I could cope with the fact my marking was taking me so long; it wasn’t being acted upon, therefore it may as well not have been happening at all.

One of the problems of my first year in teaching was getting students to do homework. More specifically, I struggled keeping tabs on students who didn’t do the homework, which meant I didn’t give consequences for failing to turn it in, which then meant I got even fewer pieces next time around.

In my second year I therefore devised a plan. First, I gave out all homeworks on brightly coloured pieces of paper that students wrote on and turned back in. All my classes started off with a silent individual task. I therefore instilled in students that at the beginning of homework hand-in day they put their brightly coloured paper on their desk before beginning their individua lstarter task. That way I could quickly glance around the room and quickly see who did and did not have their homework out. Anyone without their brightly colourer paper had a ‘homework excuse note’ dropped on their desk. This was to be completed immediately.

I am writing this post to outline and to describe a technique I learnt some years ago from a long-forgotten colleague that has had a very positive impact on my teaching and the learning of my students: the Taxonomy of Errors. As well as describing the technique I want to show how I have developed it in recent weeks, how I have used it proactively with my students and what impact it has had on their written work. Hopefully it may be useful to one or two of you.

In essence, the Taxonomy of Errors is a response to that perennial problem faced by teachers of dealing with a class that are all making

I have written before about Diagnostic Questions. A good diagnostic question can reveal a lot about a student’s thinking. Many of the questions we have written for the York Science Project have drawn on research evidence to provide the alternative answers that students might select.

When preparing diagnostic questions for GCSE classes there are two other rich sources of alternative answers that have been given by students – the Mark Scheme and the Report to Centres. Recently I spent some time with OCR GCSE Science teachers developing diagnostic questions in this way.

Use exit tickets to get a snapshot of what every student took away from your lesson

This is the single most powerful thing I’ve done all year, from lesson one, maintaining it consistently, and it’s impressed external observers and internal mentors alike.

The exit ticket provides a snapshot of whole class understanding for each and every lesson, in under two minutes. For effort to impact ratio, they’re a no brainer. I can’t even imagine planning the next lesson without them.

Imagine you have five classes of thirty students, who you teach three times a week. Marking their books is the bane of every English teacher’s life. To mark every student’s book each week, it means correcting about 300 pages a week.

One simple solution helps: use icons to set targets. Set aside five hours a week to marking books: that hour each weekday after school is the most powerful time you spend as a teacher. No other teacher marks books this often. If you do, you’ll instantly win every student’s respect. ‘How do you do it?!’ they’ll ask admiringly…

If you’ve never taken part part in a whole school book scrutiny, I’d recommend it. Seeing how students treat their exercise books across different subjects is very revealing. I’ll happily agree that students’ books can’t give a complete picture of their learning and progress in particular classes but they certainly ask interesting questions about whether marking and presentation matter.

Just for a moment, let’s assume we all understand and agree that giving quality feedback to students is the

Tests are rubbish, right? Like me, you may find yourself baring your teeth at the thought of being drilled to death, or inflicting endless rounds of mind-numbing tests on your students. That’s no way to learn, is it? All that’s going to do is produce ‘inert knowledge’ that will just sit there and be of no use whatsoever, right? Wrong. Apparently, the ‘retrieval practice’ of testing actually helps us induce “readily accessible information that can be flexibly used to solve new problems.”[1]

Most tests are conducted in order to produced summative information on how much students have learned and as such have (possibly rightly) attracted